Having announced last year that he will no longer appear in Michael Bay's action series about warring giant robots, LaBeouf has made a definite diversion into higher-brow fare. He will also star in Robert Redford's upcoming The Company You Keep and John Hillcoat's prohibition era gangster flick Lawless, the latter alongside Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Mia Wasikowska, Guy Pearce and Jessica Chastain.

LaBeouf's role in Nymphomaniac is unclear, but he will presumably be studying Von Trier's screenplay with curiosity given the film's salacious reported synopsis. Charlotte Gainsbourg is set to play the lead, a woman who reveals her entire sexual history from childhood to middle age to an older bachelor played by Stellan Skarsgård. Von Trier is promising to release Nymphomaniac in softcore and hardcore versions.

"Lars wants to see the sexual arousement of a girl [on screen]," the Danish film-maker's producer and business partner Peter Aalbæk Jensen told The Guardian last year. "If Lars wants to make explicit sex scenes in the film, he also has to make a version that can be shown on TV in Europe. He has accepted that." It is understood the softcore version will be aimed at more mainstream cinemas, while those who yearn for the full, uncut Von Trier experience will be directed towards the hardcore version.

Nymphomaniac is hardly the first Von Trier project to attract controversy for its explicit subject matter. Antichrist (2009) featured a scene in which Gainsbourg's character takes scissors to her own clitoris, while Nicole Kidman played a collared sex slave in his 2003 movie Dogville. The Australian actor said in a recent interview that she expects to take a small role in Nymphomaniac, her first film with Von Trier in nearly a decade.